The white supremacist right is penetrating the mainstream right with increasing ease.
The Conservative Political Action Conference is the premier gathering of right-wing activists and politicians in America every year, and it serves as a bellwether for the direction of the conservative movement. This year Nazis showed up.
According to an NBC News report, “a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed ‘race science’ and antisemitic conspiracy theories.” (Hitler’s Nazi Party was officially called the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”) The reporter of the article has video of one of them giving a “heil Hitler”-style salute in the lobby of the hotel where the conference took place and of other members of the group reportedly used the N-word.
This is a critical frog-in-boiling-water moment for the right: The mainstream organs of American conservatism are apparently acclimating to Nazis in their pot. That this group was able to mingle with participants at a high-profile conference, wasn’t kicked out of CPAC, and wasn’t appropriately condemned is a sign of how contiguous mainstream conservatism has become with white supremacist politics today.
Observing from across the pond, CPAC seems at fever pitch.
Feels like none of the Christians know who they’re getting into bed with. It will be a high price for them to pay.
Unfortunately there aren’t alot of rational Christians left. Secularism has been on the rise for a long time, and unsurprisingly, the people who decide religion is no longer the way to go tend to overwhelmingly be rational people. Most of the current remaining Christians are emotional thinkers, easy to manipulate with “scary” words. Their version of being religious has nothing to do with what their super important book says anymore, most of them have no idea what it says, even if they have tried reading it. They listen to what people say, not books. They follow their local shephard, and all do whatever he tells them to do. You’ll know them when you see them, they’ll be the ones calling you a sheep.
Big facts. I see it here where I live also. People coming back from church with alllll sorts of misinformation and bullshit.
They very much do know. Christian Nationalists are the biggest segment of fascists in the US, and it’s not even close.
You know what the inciting incident for their movement was? The racial integration of schools back in the 1950s. They decided to make a wedge issue out of abortion so that they could get more Christians to vote for racist policies.
The KKK is a conservative Christian organization. The United Daughters of the Confederacy espouses “Christian values.” Nick Fuentes, an out-and-proud antisemitic fascist is loud about imposing Catholicism on the rest of the country.
It’s not a coincidence; it’s a plan.
I think this was not the boiling frog moment, but when cpac exported itself to european venues.
as for fever pitch, if I’m not mistaken for the last few years they’ve had TWO cpac conferences a year.
and I’m fully convinced that the christians know who they are getting involved with, and that is an indictment on that flavor of christianity than anything else. I’m reading tim alberta’s new book “the kingdom, the power, and the glory” and he goes into in part how that version of christianity got tied into republican politics. in short, I’m less surprised that nazis showed up to cpac and more surprised that cpac actually let them in the door.